My Muslim Name Is Ameerah
by Raging Whispers
Summary: A true story of a young Australian woman who falls in love with a young Muslim man. The telling explores the issues, resolutions and cultural differences that occur when falling in love with a Muslim.


My Muslim name is Ameerah. I'm 18 years old at present. I don't really know how to start this off, I mean I used to write a lot when I was younger but I haven't written for a while. I guess I should start by telling you about myself and my current situation.

I wasn't born a Muslim; I was forced to be a Muslim. My family doesn't know I'm Muslim. I'm Australian born and my family is of European background and with my mum being raised with a somewhat Christian background and my father being raised as a Jehovah's Witness becoming Muslim is completely out of the question...Even for love.

That's the reason I am what I am, Muslim I mean. I was forced by the hand of love to become Muslim for my husband. In this religion, Muslims can only marry Muslims and I was given an ultimatum. By his family and eventually himself. I must become Muslim or we could not stay together.

I was very confused by this situation. Very hurt. My husband, my Shoaib, he seemed so normal. Just like every other guy I'd met, dated, only better. When I first met him, Shoaib was so nice; he was unlike anyone I'd ever met before. He was 19, a virgin, only been in one relationship before me that went on for two years that he eventually ended because the girl he was with kept cheating on him. Minimal baggage. And he came from Brisbane. I knew I wasn't going to let him go any time soon.

I suppose I should probably explain that I used to live in New South Wales. I was born in Ulladulla and when I was about two, my parents moved me to Wollongong. For nine years we lived in Bellambi, which is supposed to be the 'bad' suburb. Just before I turned thirteen my parents moved our family, which consisted of my mum, my dad and my younger sister, to a country town in Queensland called Maryborough as an attempt at keeping me out of trouble.

Maryborough is supposed to be a heritage town, expanding and friendly. That's completely false. The years I spent there were like another form of hell. I went through three schools in five years. I was never able to make any long-lasting friends but rather, a bunch of acquatences that were good for getting drunk with every weekend. The people I was exposed to didn't seem to possess the attribute of loyalty. Ambition and the want for a successful life was rare, especially in guys. It was a big culture shock for me personally moving from a relatively decent sized city to a small country town.

Anyway, needless to say in all my years in Maryborough I never belonged. If you've ever been away from home and felt that feeling of absolute sickness in your stomach because you know it's time to leave then you'd understand how I felt for the five years I resided there. Of those five years, three were spent with a guy named Luke. I was engaged to him since I was 16 and we broke up less than a week after my eighteenth birthday. The break-up only increased my determination to escape Maryborough.

I met Shoaib a month and a half later. Shoaib felt like my escape and eventually he did prove to be exactly that. The very first moment we laid eyes on each other I know we had some sort of understanding. He pulled up out the front of my friend Shelly's house in his parent's land cruiser, got out, didn't speak to me and loaded my bag in the boot. I remember I looked over at my friend Shelly and laughed. I knew I looked hot, I thought I was intimidating. The cause of his shyness. And I loved the power I appeared to instantly have over him.

Curtis, Shelly's boyfriend, got into the back of the land cruiser with Shelly, whilst I got into the front. Curtis is also from Brisbane. I'd met him a few weeks earlier when he'd tried to hook me up with his friend Chris. Chris was an absolute prick, but Curtis stuck around and we became friends. Curtis and Shelly started dating and so Curtis began visiting Maryborough almost every weekend. Curtis was actually the one who introduced me to Shoaib.

It's funny though, even though in a country town there isn't much varied culture I managed to be friends with the unusual. In the first few years it didn't take me long to see I didn't fit in with the regular stereotypical crowds. Whilst everybody was experiencing their first boyfriends, learning how to put make-up on and just struggling with grades in the first year of high school, I hung out with a crowd of juvenile delinquents, mainly consisting of aboriginals and half casts and a few whites. I dealt with issues like drugs and sex and crime and jail. I was 15, if that, when my first friend went away for manslaughter.

I'm attracted to having relationships, whether that be friendship or romantic, with people who are of unusual background. To be honest the white Australian is generally quite vulgar, especially at my age. I find it hard to relate to vulgarity. I've always wanted to be special and I'm constantly looking for something new in myself that makes me just that little bit more unusual. I look for that in other people too. Perhaps I look at people who are unusual as a potential accessory to my silent rebellion against plainness and therefore attach myself to them, or try to entice them to attach themselves to me. Whatever it is, I find the unknown exciting, and in people I seek it out constantly.

My first serious boyfriend, Luke, was one of the only wogs in the whole of Maryborough. He was half Maltese. I was originally attracted to him because of that reason. He was unusual, he stood out, and he wasn't of common breed. Actually I think that's one of the main reasons we lasted for three years. I kept telling myself that in this town it wasn't like I was going to find an opportunity like this again and if I was stuck here I might as well make the best of it by having the best the town had to offer. Or at least what I perceived to be the best.

Shelly and I began a friendship not long after Luke and I broke up. I was sulking at home on the internet and she randomly began talking to me on msn. Then out of the blue she invited me to go to the cinemas with her because she was too nervous to go by herself. That was the night she met Curtis for the first time. That was also the night I reached back out into Maryborough and began to live again. Shelly didn't have many friends in Maryborough but she had a lot of guy friends who lived in the surrounding areas.

Ultimately I guess to some extent I might have used her to see what opportunities I might be offered by hanging around her. I hadn't previously bothered much with her because I considered her to be a bit of a whore, and her older sister Darna, was actually an ex girlfriend of Luke's.

Shelly wasn't common in Maryborough either. Her mother was one of those Filipino mail-order brides with her father almost thirty years older than her mother. In fact neither was Curtis, he was half Dutch. I treated both my new-found friendships as a bit of a coming out party, as I hadn't really ever been on the dating market, having been tied down so young for so long. Shelly offered me a place to stay as I vented about my ex, got drunk and cried, went out and partied, and most of all, a connection via Curtis to a World I wanted into. Brisbane. Or at least somewhere out of Maryborough.

One afternoon I was sprawled out on Shelly's bed complaining to Curtis and Shelly about the lack of decent guys in Maryborough when Curtis started questioning me in regards to what sort of guy I was looking for. So I told him. I want someone black, exotic-looking, a guy who doesn't just follow the crowd, someone ambitious, with a job, someone who doesn't have a lot of baggage and most definitely someone not from Maryborough.

Curtis gave me Shoaib's number. He described Shoaib as 'weird'. He said Shoaib was the oldest son of his boss and that he worked with him every day. I didn't see a picture of Shoaib, and Curtis said he wasn't going to give me a 'hotness' rating because he didn't want to sound gay. I remember I sent a text to Shoaib introducing myself then and there and I didn't get a reply for at least four hours. I liked that. When I broke up with Luke it was like I had half the male population in town chasing me whereas Shoaib didn't even sound interested. Immediately I felt the need to lure him in, just to see if I could.

Shoaib and I talked for a week via text messaging; he didn't even ring me once. And of course I was not going to ring him. I was mildly flirting, he was barely replying. But I knew he was interested. If he wasn't he wouldn't have messaged me back. One morning during that week he even texted me a morning greeting, nothing romantic of course just a quick 'good morning stinky'. I have to admit that was probably one of the main reasons I became so interested in him, he wasn't like the other three guys that had already texted me a 'good morning beautiful/gorgeous/sexy' message. Already he was standing out from the crowd. I wanted to see him.

So I talked to Shelly and she was missing Curtis so I told her to invite Curtis up for the weekend and that he should convince Shoaib to come with him so we could meet. I think at first he was hesitant but with careful prodding from both Curtis and myself he eventually agreed. As soon as I got the confirmation, Shelly and I booked a hotel unit directly across the road from the beach at Hervey Bay which is about a thirty-five minute drive from Maryborough. She loved the idea of going on a mini-holiday with her new boyfriend and I figured that if everything else sucked for me, at least I'd have the beach.

I missed the beach. I grew up around the corner from the beach. When I lived in New South Wales I was at the beach pretty much every day. It was where I went to think, to escape, to socialise, to exercise. As I always tell everyone, the beach is my element and I knew that by incorporating it into Shoaib's little visit it could only work out to be my benefit.

As I mentioned before, after Shoaib and Curtis arrived at Shelly's, Shoaib was quiet, loaded up and we all got in the car to head to Hervey bay. As a male, I had expected Shoaib to complain about having to drive an extra thirty-five minutes from the four hours he had already travelled from Brisbane. But he didn't, in fact he barely said anything. He didn't say anything when we got to Hervey Bay and went to buy alcohol, just mentioned to Curtis he wanted to drink beer. He didn't mention anything about splitting payment for the unit, he just went in and paid for it himself and then refused any money from me.

When all of us were in the unit drinking he still didn't really talk. I tried on all my moves. I have a scar on my skin just underneath my right breast and I asked him if he wanted to see. He said 'no'. I was shocked; a guy had declined me lifting my shirt up? I asked him if he wanted to know what my first name and my middle name meant. He looked at me like I was insane but said 'yeah okay'. I remember saying something like;

"Well my first name Amie means beloved in French, and my second name Cassandra means seductress or entangler of men in Greek, so Shoaib, between them both you don't really stand a chance against me now do you?"

He went quiet. I thought I was winning. And then he laughed and went back to watching some football game on the small TV. It turned out I wasn't. I couldn't understand it, I was used to being jumped at and fought over and groped and hit on. After the break-up with my ex it was like one big party.

At one point in the night we all went swimming, drunk and delirious with the clouds rolling out overhead, sometimes a little bit of lightning. The water was cold. I was excited. I believed Shoaib couldn't resist. I felt like I was made of magic and I was going to weave it around him. The other two left and I knew it was the perfect time to begin some sort of mental seduction. I wasn't after sex. I was after being worshipped. Shoaib, being half fijian-indian and half Samoan was perfect; you couldn't get any more exotic then that. And his quietness made him mysterious. My break-up had left me broken and I knew I wouldn't be fixed any time soon unless this exquisite, intriguing creature almost submerged in front of me in the darkened salt water became addicted to me.

In that pre-tropical storm environment I had hoped to begin a romance that outweighed not only anything I had already experienced, but anything I had already read or even heard about. I wanted to create a romance that would become a legend in time to come. And being drunk and with the confidence of the environment I began to move forward, closer to him. And then I'd move further away. Enticing him to in turn, follow me. But he didn't, and after playing like this for a while I realised nothing magical was going to happen but I decided to give him one last chance to at least hit on me.

I came so close we were practically touching, and I complained I was cold, thinking that he might bring me into his arms, if only on pretence of warming my body temperature. He didn't, instead he suggested we get out and go back to the unit. Angry, embarrassed, disappointed, humiliated, I stormed out of the ocean and grabbed my towel. Shoaib picked up my shoes and I snatched them off him, practically ran across the road and headed directly into the shower hoping to scrub some sort of dignity back into my skin.

I remember that after the shower I went into my bedroom and turned off the light, I wasn't laying down in the bed long before Shoaib came in and laid down beside me. I can't remember how we started talking but we did and eventually we got to the story about our exes. Most people cringe when they hear about their interest's ex, but I think our stories at that point brought us closer. Shoaib told me about a girl he used to be in love with and had a relationship with for two years. But that she used to go clubbing without him and she'd cheat on him. Eventually she cheated on him with one of his own friends, he couldn't take it anymore and he broke up with her. It'd been seven months since then and he'd never had a girlfriend or a hook-up before or after.

I laid my head on his shoulder. He tensed up and we both went silent. I felt like I wasn't even breathing. He rolled on his side and leaned over and kissed me, at first it was nervous, rushed and sloppy so I cut the kiss and then I leaned up and tried again. He was shaking, but it worked. That night we didn't have sex, we didn't fall asleep in each other's arms, but we did sleep next to each other naked and vulnerable. And for the first time ever, I had respect for the person who was sharing my bed.


End file.
